Bitly Raises $15M Led by Khosla Ventures

Bitly, the link-shortening and tracking service, has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.

The round is aimed to help Bitly hire and grow. “We make many millions of dollars per year, but not appropriate for the growth that Bitly is trying to do,” said Bitly CEO Peter Stern in a phone interview this morning.

Stern said that Bitly’s growth plans are to expand its existing products, and that it will continue with its model of charging business users to make money. Don’t expect the site to put up ads, he said.

“The enterprise stuff works because Bitly is a consumer brand,” Stern said. “We get a sense of what the Internet cares about. An analog would be Nielsen.”

While the relaunch of Bitly as a social bookmarking destination may have upset some existing users, Stern downplayed the drama. “It was a fast-twitch response by semiprofessional users because we changed their workflow.”

There’s been no dropoff in Bitly traffic, and 200,000 new people have registered in the past month, which is a big jump, Stern said. “We gave mainstream users no reason to create a Bitly account before.”

New York City-based Bitly has now raised a total of $28.5 million. Existing investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and RRE Ventures also participated in the round.

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